The U.S. Treasury has backed away from its position that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be required by law to slash their holdings of home mortgages, a Treasury official said. (Bush Administration)
The softer Treasury stance suggests that the Bush administration is giving up its effort to change the fundamental nature of the two government-sponsored providers of funding for home loans and would settle for merely regulating them much more closely.
Under Mr. Paulson's predecessor, John Snow, the Treasury pushed for provisions that would have clamped tight restrictions on the type and amount of mortgages that Fannie and Freddie could hold as investments. That idea was embraced in a version of the legislation narrowly passed by the Senate Banking Committee but was rejected by the full House of Representatives (Republican Controlled), which passed a bill that doesn't require any reduction of the investment portfolios. Those portfolios currently total more than $1.4 trillion.
Now, the Treasury official said, the Treasury would back a bill giving the new regulatory agency discretion to decide how large the portfolios should be and what sort of assets they could contain. The regulator would make that decision, through a public rule-making process, based on the need for the companies to operate in a "safe and sound" manner and to avoid creating "systemic risks" to the financial markets, the official said. "Systemic risk" refers to the possibility that problems at one company could disrupt financial markets.
The new Treasury position probably comes too late to allow Congress to reach a compromise on the issue before the November election, said Howard Glaser, a mortgage-industry consultant who was a senior housing official in the Clinton administration, though he said a last-minute deal isn't impossible.
Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, also has softened his stand on the companies' portfolios.